Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Age! Nyet!

“An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered cloak upon a
stick.” William Butler Yeats’ words are a generous and even euphemistic fashion
statement. And he qualifies the dismissal of age with “unless Soul clap it’s
hands and sing,” an appeal to the spiritual. Lear, for example, is a play about age and transcendence. Shakespeare’s character comes out the other side, maybe not
whole, but more holistically inclined than he was at the start. But age
actually has few defenders. Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell in Beckett’s Endgame live in dustbins. The fate of
the aged is a heightened awareness of finitude that torments even Beckett’s
more youthful characters, Clov: “Do you believe in the life to come?” Hamm:
“Mine was always that.” The fact is there is nothing particularly commendable
about age. To invoke Shakespeare again, here’s Jaques in the famous “All the
world a stage" speech from ,As You Like It, “Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second
childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans
everything.” Unless of course you have a good gastroenterologist. Remember Mark
Leyner’s comic novel, My Cousin, My
Gastroenterologist? A good urologist or proctologist doesn’t hurt either.
And then there is Ray Kurzweil who offers the prospect of immortality through
microprocessors with even organs of the brain being refit with computer parts.
Maybe someday you’ll be able to walk right into your local Apple store and
purchase a new lease on life.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.